


a day in your celebration

by rigatona



Category: Supernatural
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-12
Updated: 2012-07-12
Packaged: 2017-11-09 19:32:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,501
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/457557
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rigatona/pseuds/rigatona
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's a good day.</p>
            </blockquote>





	a day in your celebration

**Author's Note:**

> This is for [James](http://felixgaeta.tumblr.com/)!  
> I hope you like it. <3
> 
> Title is from Stevie Wonder's "Happy Birthday"  
>  _There ought to be a law against  
>  Anyone who takes offense  
> At a day in your celebration_
> 
> If there are any errors, feel free to let me know, as this is unbeta'd.

Dean is not a morning person - let that be said. He is a morning riser, but by no means is he a morning person. Morning people are people like Sam and Cas, who rise with the sun and do whatever morning people do in those hours of the morning when certain channels are still playing infomercials.

Lack of morning person-ness aside, there are certain things that Dean will get up early for - if there’s a time sensitive hunt about, or if there’s something special he needs to do. Today is not a hunting day, but there’s still reason enough to crawl out of his and Cas’s bed and sneak into the bathroom. He pulls on a pair of jeans and a shirt before tip-toeing downstairs with his shoes in hand.

Cas is actually still sleeping, by some miracle (though that miracle could be more accurately described by he and Sam consenting to Scrabble games until the very wee hours of the morning), but Sam is in the kitchen with a pot of coffee on, and he gets eyed hard when he comes around the corner looking alive in a way he usually doesn’t.

“Is he -” Sam makes a face and jerks his head towards the stairs. Cas isn’t the angel he once was by any stretch, and it’s visible in how he tires, how he gets dirty, how he’s emotional in ways he wasn’t before - but that’s not to say that he may not be able to hear them from upstairs.

“Yeah, still asleep. I’m headed out,” to the store, he doesn’t say, “do you have everything planned for this afternoon?”

“Yeah. We’re going to go see that new Pixar movie around two, and I plan to drag him down to the park if you need more time. You know how he loves the ducks.” Sam makes a face like ducks are the cutest thing, because that last line isn’t fooling anybody, and Dean goes over to pour some coffee into a thermos. He’ll drink it on the way - he has to make a couple of stops in the next big town over because Sioux Falls’s shopping center really left some stuff to be desired.

“Alright. Let me know when you guys leave.” (All other things about today aside, Dean definitely doesn’t have the energy to be chatty. Eugh, mornings.) Dean puts the lid on his thermos before walking to the door, where he puts on his shoes and picks up his keys and wallet. “Have fun.” Sam gives him a nod and turns away to poke around in the fridge.

*

It is only an hour drive to the next town, and Dean stops in at the layaway desk at Macy’s to pick up the pajamas Sam had reserved there. Cas has some sort of... addiction to pajama sets. Dean and Sam have always been relatively content to sleep in their boxers, but Cas doesn’t really enjoy going to bed unless he’s swaddled in sleep pants AND a shirt that matches (and buttons. Buttons are important.) Of course, there are many nights when Cas doesn’t stay in his pajamas for long, and he’s always a little too tired out afterwards to put them back on after, but it’s the thought that counts on that front. 

His next stop is a little shop that he actually found on accident when they got around to moving into Bobby’s house. (Losing him twice was high on the list of the worst things to ever happen to them as a unit, and when his land was given to them in his will, well. Bobby’s place was always second-home to him and Sam anyway, and Cas was along for the ride. It’s what he tells himself, anyway.) Sam had sent him out for linens, which was in no way specific enough, and Dean had rolled by “Steve’s Woodworking” in the later hours of the evening. There was a rocking chair in the window, with a dark, delicate table set up next to it. Dean had felt compelled to stop and go in, and the man behind the counter “Why, I’m Steve himself, and all of these are the works of my wife and I,” managed to convince him into buying a set of bookends for Sam - ornate and detailed, painted to look like two halves of a forest and lake scene. Sam had loved them, and Dean had been planning for a design for this occasion for nearly a month before cementing it.

When Dean goes inside there’s no one at the counter, but the door to the back room is propped open. “Steve!” he calls, and a few moments later the man comes around to the front. 

“Dean, it’s good to see you,” Steve says, clapping him on the shoulder like Dean’s the younger one in this scenario (he isn’t), and Dean feels like Steve means it. “I just finished up your commission over the weekend, I think you’re going to like it.”

“I’m sure I will,” Dean says, and watches as Steve goes around to the back to bring up his item. It’s - well, it’s better than what he ever could have imagined. Dean pays for it and promises to come back by “soon”, and then he’s headed back to Sioux Falls. There’s a bakery off the side of the main street, and he stops in to pick up an order there, too. His phone buzzes mid-transaction, and after Dean’s smiled his way through the rest of the social process (he only flirts by way of politeness... He and Cas are known around here - the pie is delicious.) he checks his phone.

Sam: Just made it to lunch. At that little burger joint off of 26th by the college.

Dean takes the short way home and piles his purchases into the house. He puts the cake from the bakery onto the table - it’s big, with thick buttercream icing, and red velvet on the inside. (There were jokes, once, about Cas’s favorite being angel food cake, but he was neutral when it came down to it. Didn’t care much for devil’s food cake, though, so that’s something.)

The pajamas are already giftwrapped, and Dean stacks them on the other gift where he’s set it in the corner of the kitchen. He wanders around the house for a little bit, putting books away in the library (and not even cringing at that book smell, this is what domesticity has done to him) and tidies up the living room before going into the kitchen. The cake gets demoted to the microwave while he makes lunch/dinner (and the fact that there is no portmanteau for that is a crime, but both “linner” and “dunch” sound terrible), which is spaghetti with the homemade meatballs that Cas found a recipe for and loved eating at every opportunity. He’s checking on the general state of the garlic bread in the oven - it smells delicious, but could take a few more minutes - when Sam texts him again. He’s asking about Dean’s general preparedness, and Dean shoots back a “head on home” before setting the table. The theatre is fifteen minutes from the house; unnamed meal will be done by the time Sam and Cas make it in. 

There was a Dean, before, that would have been antsy about making dinner and buying gifts for someone he was romantic with. He and Cassie did a lot of eating out in their brief romantic foray, and Lisa did most of the cooking - Dean isn’t, and wasn’t, a bad cook, but she liked it. That Dean isn’t around anymore, though. Making dinner is just another thing that they do, now. Sam cooks on Mondays and Thursdays, Cas on Tuesday and Friday, and Dean cooks on the other three days (though they sometime order in pizza on Saturday. Living wild! He might eventually learn how to make pizza at home; there’s no place that gets their topping ratio just right, and doing it by hand might be the only way to avoid bloodshed it if continues to be a thing in their new, domestic household.)

Dean hears when Sam’s car (something far less douchey than that thing he was driving back... before.) pulls into the yard, and he doesn’t do anything so pansy as wait by the front door. He’s tempted to, though. The sooner dinner is over, the sooner they can do cake and presents, and Dean has never been so antsy for someone else’s gifts ever.

When Cas walks into the house - and then into the kitchen, following his nose - he’s alone. Sam found some reason to stay back at the car, and, well. Dean appreciates it. 

“Dean, what is this? Where were you all day?” Cas crosses the room to where Dean is at the stove (cooling spaghetti and garlic bread in front of him) and Dean hugs him when they meet. Dean is blaming domesticity for what happened to his “i’m too cool for hugs unless someone died” mentality, but... Mostly he just likes to pull Cas close to him. He pecks Cas on the mouth and gives him a brief squeeze. 

“Happy birthday,” is what he says in reply, and there’s something about Cas’s face that lights up at it. He and Sam had done some general math and asked a couple of pointed questions about when Cas had first taken Jimmy as a vessel (though there is no longer that distinction; Jimmy is long gone and hopefully in a better place) and Cas is... one of them now. He needs a birthday, if only for the obligatory awkward songs in restaurants and that feeling of knowing that someone was thinking of him and remembered. Maybe they won’t all be as thought-out as this first one to celebrate together... but birthdays were practically invented as a yearly highlight.

“Dean,” Cas says in that intense way he’s always said it, and then Dean finds himself with even more of an armful of his - life partner? significant other? boyfriend? - Cas. He’s being soundly kissed when Sam finally makes it inside, and they break apart when the front door opens to protect Sam’s innocence. 

Sam makes it into the kitchen somehow, carrying an open box of what must be books by the look of his face. There is nothing heavier than books (they say “knowledge is power”, but they mean “you’ll need a lot of power to move all this knowledge”), and when he sits the box in the fourth chair at the table, Dean imagines the chair breaking through and spilling knowledge all over Sam’s toes. Would be a bitch to clean up.

“What’s that, Sam?” Dean asks, because this was not in the plan, and when he peers inside, he finds what looks like an entire library of fiction. The books aren’t new, but Cas is a voracious reader, and-

“Oh, wow.” And there’s Cas looking at the box like there’s nothing he would like more than to skip dinner and just sit and read for the rest of forever.

“They’re for you. Happy birthday, Cas.” Sam pulls Cas into a hug and when they part, Dean moves to get the other presents from the corner. He passes the wrapped pajamas over with a “Those are from Sam too,” and the sheer look of delight on Cas’s face when he makes it into the package and runs a hand over the fabric makes Dean want to smile too.

“And, uh,” he pulls his present away from the wall, where it was hidden, “this is from me.”

If there’s one thing that trumps Cas’s colossal love of reading, it’s quite possibly reading while in a rocking chair. There had been one left in some overrun corner of the living room, but it had only held up for a couple of uses before falling apart either because of old age or because it had been misused as a table for too long. When it broke (and after Dean attempted to fix it, unsuccessfully), the first thing that came to mind was that rocking chair that had been in the window of Steve’s place. Working out the design was the hardest part, but Steve was a pen-and-paper artist as much as he was a woodworker, and the final result is the pine beauty he picked up this morning. 

The chair is a dark stain, mostly because there wasn’t really a way to get a wood as white as he would have liked. But the back of it is designed to look like angel wings (or what Dean imagines angel wings to look like; Cas wasn’t particularly forthcoming with the facts and there’s only so much interpretation he can do from old memories of shadows on one of the most important nights of his life.) The wings themselves are wide, and the chair is a little wider than a standard rocking chair because of it, but they also drape themselves around the sides to trail off into the arms. It starts off extremely detailed, from the top, but as they move down they become less and less so, melding into the legs of the chair. 

There are a lot of things Cas lost when he put his cards in with Sam and Dean. His angelic origin, though, isn’t going anywhere, and there may be bad parts of themselves that they each can’t accept on a personal level, but something so bright about Cas isn’t something that he should have to push away. There are a lot of things that Dean didn’t expect about his life, and being intimately attached to a once-supernatural creature is one of them, but Cas is just as much of a person as he and Sam are. 

“Dean -” Cas starts to say, but Dean cuts him off.

“Come sit in it. Tell me if you like it?” And there’s this inner part of Dean that wants to grin, so he does. Cas smiles back, wide and reaching his eyes, and then he’s sinking into the chair like it was made for him.

“It’s perfect, Dean. I mean it. And it’s so beautiful.” Dean leans down to press a kiss into his hair, says “I’m glad you like it,” and this feels like the best possible way the day could have gone.

And once they’ve eaten that mythical lunch/dinner, and then after Cas demolishes two generous slices of the cake, they move the rocking chair into the living room where the old one used to be. Cas spends the time before they’re ready to go to bed in the chair with a blanket and a copy of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. Dean can only envision that he’ll tear through all the books and then make them watch all the films, and that he’ll have to comfort him when Snape dies - because even if he wasn’t big on the books, he consoled Sam through it too.

And, as far as Cas is concerned? He’s never had a day so good.


End file.
